"Tonight, we will honor the greatest writers in America with a modest 9 by 12 certificate and a check for three thousand dollars...three thousand dollars? Stephen King makes more than that for writing boo on a cocktail napkin." - Jimmy Breslin

Of all things, I think that this was actually caused by a bit of bad code leftover from a forum upgrade. Glad that finding and removing that seemed to do the trick (and that the problem code snippet wasn't buried way deep in one of the files).